Posts Tagged ‘history’

In 1990 in Targu Mures, Romania.
A ‘riot’ is actually a massacre.
Romanian and Hungarian peasants were beaten.
No matter the reason.
Criminals are not found.
Exactly the same stage with the miners, just as elsewhere in the country.
A report said it has been ‘repressive elements’ were against the country’s authorities.
It is said that it was not communism, that after the shooting in the Christmas Day of Ceausescu couple all ‘elements’ of the old leadership were not changed.
Old traditions are not forget, right?
Inter-ethnic conflict was provoked. With violence. Innocent victims. The army came after beating happened in the streets and murdering in Targu Mures.
Reports do not certify the truth. They certify only what they want to say. They created the false idea that Romania is no longer under the totalitarian regime, when everywhere after that outrageous murder were caused riots and people were beaten from upper – order.
And who could give the order?
At this question that many in the country do not want to answer because there are many hidden files and many murderers of people who have now 70-80 years old. Putting them in jail already means nothing. The consequences of their actions leave a bitter taste.

The name they coined us – emigrants – is fundamentally erroneous, since this was not a voluntary migration for the purpose of finding an alternative place to settle. The emigrants found themselves not a new homeland but a place of refuge in exile until the storm passes – Deportees that’s what we are, outcasts. (Bertold Brecht)

Today I will ‘invent’ the Historical Surrealism.
Why?
BECAUSE Felix Nussbaum painted in the XX-th Century lots of paintings about the Holocaust times and the fear that he felt it and it was all over the Jewish people.
Here we meet irrational soul mechanisms which are transmitted directly, without the intervention of logic censorship.
His father was a veteran and a German patriot who encouraged his son’s artwork passionately.

He studied at the Berlin School of Fine and Applied Arts and a master student of Hans Meid in 1928-1929 and married the polish painter Felka Platek.

The first works were influenced by the Vincent van Gogh – many traces of his style, gloomy, sad or an extreme melancholy- and then entered in the Surrealism – primarily influenced by Giorgio de Chirico and Carl Hofer- .
The first Surrealistic painting was the The Paris Square, where he is alluding his school and the studies of Artists from the Prussian Academy of Arts.

Nussbaum’s Berlin studio was set on fire because of his Jewish belief and some 150 works fell victim to the flames. During his travels along the Italian Riviera, Nussbaum succeeded, at least for a certain time, in counterbalancing the threatening events taking place in Germany by painting pictures that showed a soothing kind of beauty.
To return at the Historical Surrealism proposed to me in Felix‘s works.
I proposed BECAUSE to the days when he was – in Germany of the Second World War – and for that he captures situations of “natural” -or not- Surreal way.

He evokes those moments of terror – that we already know – and in private life and a whole – groups of people.
In principle, his portraits are traced by terrorized shadows, allusions at the fear of the following and low of the human condition – as if the unity of mankind remains only shadows of humanity.

Self-Portrait with Apple Blossum

Prisoners in Saint-Cyprien

– this was painted when Germany invaded Belgium, when all the refugees were taken from their apartments at dawn and instructed to take 48 hours worth of supplies and sent to the French internment camp at Saint Cyprien.
Here we see the whole scene full of hopelessness, loneliness, despair and pain.

Ledenpoppen 1943

Self- portrait with Felka Platek, 1942

This realistic and gloomy painting, it’s one of the most impressive work of Nussbaum.
Since 1934 the colours, motifs and metaphors of his pictures attest to a foreboding, which warned of an uncertain future.
In 1934-1944 the couple lived in Belgium, in exile and then start Felix’s emotional isolation and artistic loneliness.

In the ‘Triumph of Death'(1944) it’s a hopeless world which is reflected in the apocalyptic landscape of the late WORLD WAR II years presented.
Those instruments-playing skeletons who dance around a pile of debris made up of various insignia from the world of art and the sciences.

Next to the film rolls, a musical score and microscopes, containing the debris with objects from Nussbaum’s everyday life like his wife’s tailor’s dummy or his father’s car. It’s a subjective testimonial to culture and biographically important objects are thus destroyed equally alongside one another.
In 1944 the both couples – Felix with Felka and his parents were murdered in Auschwitz and in the late of 1944’s his brother was killed too.
The rotting organ player at the centre of the painting, who bears Nussbaum’s own features, was taken from his 1943 painting Organ Grinder.